By Russell A. Berman · Friday, October 6, 2006 Robert Redeker’s essay on Islam and the Free World has been discussed here during the past two days. Its publication in Le Figaro on September 19 led to a wave of death threats against the author that have forced him into hiding. The advocate of free speech—the key theme of his essay—has lost his freedom. Here two documents characterizing recent developments: a letter by Redeker to André Glucksmann and excerpts from the editorial of Le Monde of October 1.
A Letter of Robert Redeker to André Glucksmann
Dear André,
Bonjour.
I am now in a catastrophic personal situation. Numerous and very precise death threats have been sent to me, and I have been condemned to death by organizations of Al-Qaeda. The Anti-Terrorist Coordinating Force [UCLAT] and the Bureau of Territorial Surveillance [DST] are involved, but . . . I no longer have the right to stay in my home (the websites where I am condemned to death include a map describing how to get to my house to kill me; there is a photograph of me and the places where I work, with telephone numbers, along with the declaration of condemnation). At the same time, I have no place to go, I am obliged to wander, two nights here, two nights there . . . I am under constant police protection. I have to cancel all my planned talks. And the authorities oblige me to keep me moving. I have become homeless. A terrible financial situation results, since all these costs are my responsibility, including the possibility of having to rent somewhere far from here, the costs of two households, legal fees, etc. . . . It is terribly sad. I exercised my constitutional right, and I have been punished for it, on the very soil of the Republic. This affair is also an attack on our national sovereignty: foreign laws, decided by fanatic criminophiles, punish me for having exercised a French constitutional right, and even in France, I must suffer great damage.
In friendship
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, October 5, 2006 The circumstances around the publication of Redeker’s article in Le Figaro of September 19 were discussed in a prior blog, as was the first half of the essay. In the second half Redeker addresses the question of violence in religion, particularly in Islam, but with reference to the status of violence—and their surpassing—in Judaism and Christianity as well. The argument proceeds through three levels: a characterization of the founding prophecy and the figure of the prophet in Islam; a discussion of the anthropological standing of a central ritual in Islam; and finally a comparative treatment of violence in the three Abrahamic traditions.
Redeker draws briefly on the work of Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist historian of Islam, known especially for his book on Mohammed (and additionally one of the initial sources for a theory of “Islamic fascism). The portrait Redeker paints is far from complimentary, including quotations from Rodinson that convey “some truths that are as important as they are tabooed in France.” These include the recounts of Mohammed’s early militarism, his reliance on a private army, the attacks on caravans, the destruction of Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula, as well as his marital practices.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, October 4, 2006 News reports over the weekend, including in the New York Times of September 30, recounted developments in France involving Robert Redeker, an article of whose in Le Figaro of September 19 on Islam elicited death threats which have forced him into hiding.
Redeker has been described as a high school teacher in Toulouse, which is true. He is also the author of some ten books and numerous article publications, listed on his c.v. He has written for Le Monde as well as for Le Figaro (so he cannot be cast simply as conservative); indeed he is an editorial board member of Les Temps Modernes.
Unfortunately it is important to underscore all of this. We are facing another case of threats to free speech and free thought in Europe, but the news reporting subtly tries to minimize the significance (did somebody say “appeasement”?). There are suggestions that he is merely a high school teacher (as if high school teachers have less of a right to free speech than do the journalists of the wire services), or that he was writing for the “center-right” Le Figaro, suggesting that he probably got what he deserved. Shall we henceforth write that Elaine Sciolino writes for the “center-left” New York Times? In fact, Redeker turns out not to be a “center-rightist,” for whose free speech our “center-left” might not give a hoot, but very much a European intellectual with a publication record with all appropriate pedigrees.
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By Vernaccia · Tuesday, October 3, 2006 Much to the chagrin of those terrorists who were hoping to be the ones to shut her up, Oriana Fallaci passed away peacefully in her beloved Florence, surrounded by her sister, her nephews, and very few close friends—those, that is, who did not repudiate the Italian intellectual after her well-known and courageous stance vis-à-vis the Islamic war on the Western world. The room in the downtown clinic, where she spent her last few days, overlooked both the Florence synagogue and Brunelleschi’s dome, two of the most powerful symbols of that Judeo-Roman legacy at the heart of the Western culture that Fallaci so strenuously and tenaciously defended.
She loved Florence as much as she loved her adopted home, New York. There, she owned a town house on the Upper East Side where she had lived for many years. It was shortly after the 9/11 attack that, in her home in Manhattan, she wrote a powerful and hard-hitting editorial for Il Corriere della Sera. An outcry of civic courage as well as a rare example of journalism which tells it like it is, the article was a preview of what she was to discuss in her best selling book The Rage and The Pride, followed a few years later by The Force of Reason, and more recently by The Apocalypse.
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By Aviezer Tucker · Monday, October 2, 2006 The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. By Gil Eyal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xxix + 238.
Many social scientists have noted that the popular carnivals that accompanied the revolutions of 1989 did not last. When the masses returned home, the same nomenklatura elite remained in power, even if it had to share power with a new democratically elected political elite. [1] 1989 was not a year of social revolutions but of political upheavals. Since post-Communist civil societies are feeble or absent, elites have a far broader maneuvering space than elites in other democratic contexts. [2] Elite theory is increasingly useful and used for the analysis of post-Communist politics and societies. In the Czech and Slovak contexts, it is striking to note that the division of Czechoslovakia was agreed upon by the respective political elites in 1992 without popular approval. It is unlikely that the division of Czechoslovakia would have been ratified in a plebiscite. Accordingly, sociologist Gil Eyal attempts to understand the division of Czechoslovakia as neither the result of deep historical rifts between the Czech and Slovak peoples, nor of conflicting economic interests, nor of unintended game-theoretic implications of the 1968 Czechoslovak federal constitution, but of a deal between two conflicting wings of what he calls the Czechoslovak “new class.” Eyal’s new class is composed of “knowledge experts,” bureaucrats, the intelligentsia, managers, and technocrats. Since the Slovak elite has had a federalist, pro-Czech faction, and a nationalist, anti-federalist faction since the early twentieth century, Eyal’s interesting question is: How did the Czech and Slovak elites come to agree on the dismantling of a federation that held for three-quarters of a century?
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By Matthias Küntzel · Saturday, September 30, 2006 This is part three of Matthias Küntzel’s article “Confronting Anti-Semitism — But How?” which appears in Telos 136 (Fall 2006). Parts one and two appeared on Thursday and Friday. Click here to purchase the full issue. The German version is available on Matthias Küntzel’s website, www.matthiaskuentzel.de
Openness instead of Concealment
What would have happened if the anti-Semitism of the member of the Bundestag Hohmann had been articulated through e-mails internal to the CDU, instead of in a public speech? Would the public have ever found out about it? Or would those responsible have outwardly kept quiet on the basis of party loyalty?
The conservative party’s own Hans-Böckler Foundation decided against openness in a comparable situation. Until May of this year, the anti-Semitism argument internal to the foundation, which flared up in February 2003 on the Böckler Foundation Fellows mailing list, remained concealed. The reason for the controversy was a paper containing anti-Semitic stereotypes, which had been composed and distributed by a doctoral candidate of Arab descent, who was supported by the foundation. Several other scholarship recipients arranged things so that the debate could be reflected in a self-critical way, in the context of a graduate conference in November 2003. And, fortunately, a general political seminar about anti-Semitism on the Left was sponsored by the Böckler Foundation and organized in Berlin as well.
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